![\"Foreign](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/f\/f3\/Russian_Foreign_Intelligence_Agency.gif\/150px-Russian_Foreign_Intelligence_Agency.gif\" "\\"SVR\\"")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The need for counterintelligence (CI) has not gone away, nor is it likely to.\u00a0 The end of the Cold War has not even meant an end to the CI threat from the former Soviet Union.\u00a0 The foreign intelligence service of the new democratic Russia, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki Rossii (SVRR), has remained active against us.\u00a0 It was the SVRR that took over the handling of Aldrich Ames from its predecessor, the KGB, in 1991.\u00a0 It was the SVRR that ran CIA officer Harold James Nicholson against us from 1994 to 1996.\u00a0 It was the SVRR that was handling FBI special agent Earl Pitts when he was arrested for espionage in 1996.\u00a0 It was the SVRR that planted\u00a0one of their\u00a0listening devices<\/a> in a conference room of the State Department in Washington in the summer of 1999.\u00a0 And it was the SVRR that was handling FBI special agent Robert Hanssen when he was arrested on charges of espionage in February 2001.<\/p>\n The Russians are not alone.\u00a0 There have been serious, well-publicized concerns about Chinese espionage in the United States.\u00a0 The Department of Energy significantly increased security at its national laboratories last year in response to allegations that China had stolen US nuclear weapons secrets.<\/p>\n Paul Redmond, the former Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence at the CIA, told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in early 2000 that a total of at least 41 countries are trying to spy on the United States.\u00a0 Besides mentioning Russia, China, and Cuba, he also cited several “friends,” including France, Greece, Indonesia, Israel, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan.\u00a0 He warned of a pervasive CI threat to the United States.<\/p>\n The United States, as the world\u2019s only remaining superpower, will be the constant target of jealousies, resentments, rivalries, and challenges to its economic well-being, security, and leadership in the world.\u00a0 This inevitably means that the United States will be the target of large-scale foreign espionage.<\/p>\n A Choice Assignment<\/strong><\/p>\n When I joined the CIA, one of my first interim assignments was with the old CI Staff.\u00a0 I found it fascinating.\u00a0 I was assigned to write a history of the Rote Kapelle, the Soviet espionage network in Nazi-occupied Western Europe during World War II.<\/p>\n With its expanded computer power, NSA <\/a>was breaking out the actual messages sent between the NKVD center in Moscow and the clandestine radios of the various cells in Western Europe.\u00a0 Incredibly, these messages came to me.<\/p>\n There I was, a brand new junior officer, literally the first person in the CIA to see the day-to-day traffic from these life-and-death operations.\u00a0 I was deeply affected by the fear, heroism, and drama in these messages.\u00a0 Above all, I felt privileged to have been given such an opportunity.<\/p>\n Building on an earlier study of the Rote Kapelle by the CI Staff, I completed a draft several months later that incorporated the new material.\u00a0 To my great surprise, this study was well received by my immediate superiors, and I was told that I was to be rewarded with a personal interview and congratulations from James Jesus Angleton, the legendary head of the CI Staff from 1954 to 1974.<\/p>\n Angleton\u2019s office was on the second floor of the Original Headquarters Building.\u00a0 I was first ushered into an outer office, where Angleton\u2019s aides briefed me on how to conduct myself.\u00a0 Then I went alone into the inner sanctum.<\/p>\n The room was dark, the curtains were drawn, and there was just one small lamp on Angleton\u2019s desk.\u00a0 I later heard that Angleton had eye trouble and that the light hurt his eyes, but I was convinced the real reason for the semidarkness was to add to his mystique.\u00a0 It certainly worked on me!<\/p>\n I nervously briefed Angleton on my study, and he listened without interrupting, just nodding from time to time.\u00a0 When I finished, he methodically attacked every one of my conclusions.\u00a0 Didn\u2019t I know the traffic was a deception?\u00a0 Hadn\u2019t it occurred to me that Leopold Trepper, the leader of the Rote Kapelle, was a German double?\u00a0 He went on and on, getting further and further out.<\/p>\n Even I, as a brand new officer, could tell that this great mind, this CI genius, had lost it.\u00a0 I thought he was around the bend.\u00a0 It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my career.<\/p>\n When the meeting was over, I was glad to get out of there, and I vowed to myself that I would never go anywhere near CI again.\u00a0 I did not keep that vow.\u00a0 In my overseas assignments with the Agency, I found myself drawn toward Soviet CI operations.\u00a0 Nothing seemed to quicken my pulse more, and I was delighted when I was called back to Headquarters in 1989 to join the new Counterintelligence Center (CIC) as Ted Price\u2019s deputy.\u00a0 When Ted moved upstairs in early 1991 to become the Associate Deputy Director for Operations, I was named chief of the Center.<\/p>\n Today, many years after that initial disagreeable encounter with CI, I find it hard to believe that it is actually my picture on the wall of the CIC conference room at CIA Headquarters, where the photos of all former CIA counterintelligence chiefs are displayed.\u00a0 There I am, number seven in a row that begins with Angleton.<\/p>\n So, after a career that ended up being far more CI-oriented than I could ever have imagined, I would like to offer some personal observations in the form of “The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence.”\u00a0 I have chosen the form of commandments because I believe the basic rules of CI are immutable and should be scrupulously followed.\u00a0 In my view, it makes little difference whether the adversary is the Russians, the Cubans, the East Germans, the Chinese, or someone else.\u00a0 It likewise makes little difference whether we are talking about good CI practices in 1985 or in 2005.\u00a0 Unfortunately, as I watch US CI today, I am increasingly concerned that the principles I consider fundamental to effective CI are not being followed as carefully and consistently as they should be.<\/p>\n These commandments were not handed down to me from a mountaintop, and I make no claim that they are inspired or even definitive.\u00a0 They are simply the culmination, for what they are worth, of my experience.\u00a0 They are intended primarily for my fellow practitioners in CI today, but also for any younger officers in the Intelligence Community (IC) who might someday want to join us.<\/p>\n CI that is passive and defensive will fail.\u00a0 We cannot hunker down in a defensive mode and wait for things to happen.\u00a0 I believe we are spending far too much money on fences, safes, alarms, and other purely defensive measures to protect our secrets.\u00a0 That is not how we have been hurt in recent years.\u00a0 Spies have hurt us.\u00a0 Our CI mindset should be relentlessly offensive.\u00a0 We need to go after our CI adversaries.<\/p>\n Aggressive double agent<\/a> (DA) operations are essential to any CI program, but not the predictable, hackneyed kind we have so often pursued.\u00a0 We need to push our bright and imaginative people to produce clever new scenarios for controlled operations, and we need more of them.\u00a0 The opposition services should be kept constantly off guard so that they never suspect that we have actually controlled the operations they believe they initiated from the beginning.\u00a0 When the requirements, modus operandi, and personality objectives of the DA operation have been achieved, we should in a greater number of cases pitch the opposition case officer.\u00a0 If only one out of 10 or 20 of these recruitments takes, it is worth it.\u00a0 And CI professionals, of course, should not rely exclusively on their own efforts.\u00a0 They should constantly prod their HUMINT <\/a>colleagues to identify, target, and recruit officers from the opposition intelligence services.\u00a0 The key to CI success is penetration.\u00a0 For every American spy, there are several members of the opposition service who know who he or she is.\u00a0 No matter what it takes, we have to have penetrations.<\/p>\n We should operate aggressively against the nontraditional as well as the traditional adversaries.\u00a0 How many examples do we need of operations against Americans by so-called friendly countries to convince us that the old intelligence adage is correct:\u00a0 there are friendly nations, but no friendly intelligence services. If we suspect for whatever reason that the operatives of a foreign intelligence service, friend or foe, are operating against us, we should test them.\u00a0 We should dress up an enticing morsel, made to order for that specific target, and send it by them.\u00a0 If they take it, we have learned something we needed to know, and we have an operation.\u00a0 If they reject it, as true friends should, we have learned something, too.\u00a0 In either event, because we are testing a “friend,” plausible deniability has to be strictly preserved.\u00a0 Every foreign service is a potential nontraditional adversary; no service should get a lifetime pass from US offensive CI operations.<\/p>\n It has been true for years\u2014to varying degrees throughout the IC\u2014that CI professionals have not been favored, to the extent they deserved, with promotions, assignments, awards, praise, esteem, or other recognition.\u00a0 The truth is that CI officers are not popular.\u00a0 They are not always welcome when they walk in.\u00a0 They usually bring bad news.\u00a0 They are easy marks to criticize when things go wrong.\u00a0 Their successes are their failures.\u00a0 If they catch a spy, they are roasted for having taken so long.\u00a0 If they are not catching anyone, why not?\u00a0 What have they done with all that money they spent on CI?\u00a0 It is no-win.<\/p>\n For much of my career, many of our best people avoided becoming CI specialists.\u00a0 CI was not prestigious.\u00a0 It had a bad reputation.\u00a0 It was not fast track.\u00a0 It did not lead to promotions or good assignments.\u00a0 Angleton left a distasteful legacy that for years discredited the CI profession.\u00a0 Ted Price did more than anyone else in the Agency to reverse that trend and to rehabilitate CI as a respected professional discipline.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, that battle is still not completely won.\u00a0 We have to do more to get our CI people promoted, recognized, and respected so that our best young officers will be attracted to follow us into what we know is a noble profession and where the need is so great.<\/p>\n This is so fundamental to CI, but it is probably the least followed of the commandments.\u00a0 Any CI program worthy of the name has to be able to engage the opposition on the street, the field of play for espionage.\u00a0 And when we do go to the street, we have to be the best service there.\u00a0 If we are beaten on the street, it is worse than not having been there at all.<\/p>\n For years, we virtually conceded the streets of the world\u2019s capitals, including the major espionage centers, to the KGB, the GRU, and the East European services because we either did not know how to do it or we were not willing to pay the price for a thoroughly professional, reliable, full-time, local surveillance capability.<\/p>\n Opposition intelligence officers have to be watched, known meeting areas have to be observed, and, when an operation goes down\u2014often on short notice\u2014undetectable surveillance has to cover it, identify the participants, and obtain evidence.<\/p>\n This capability is expensive\u2014selection, training, vehicles, photo gear, video, radios, other real spy equipment<\/a>,\u00a0safe apartments, observation posts, and on and on\u2014but, if we do not have it, we will be a second-rate CI service and will not break the major cases.<\/p>\n I am very discouraged when I talk to young CI officers today to find how little they know about the history of American CI.\u00a0 CI is a difficult and dangerous discipline.\u00a0 Many good, well-meaning CI people have gone wrong and made horrendous mistakes.\u00a0 Their failures in most cases are well documented, but the lessons are lost if our officers do not read the CI literature.<\/p>\n I find it inconceivable that any CI practitioner today could ply his or her trade without an in-depth knowledge of the Angleton era.\u00a0 Have our officers read Mangold?\u00a0 Have they read Legend and Wilderness of Mirrors?\u00a0 Do they know the Loginov case, HONETOL, MHCHAOS, Nosenko, Pollard, and Shadrin?\u00a0 Are they familiar with Aspillaga and the Cuban DA debacle?\u00a0 Have they examined our mistakes in the Ames and Howard cases?\u00a0 Are they staying current with recent releases like The Mitrokhin Archive and The Haunted Wood?<\/p>\n I believe it is an indispensable part of the formation of any American CI officer\u2014and certainly a professional obligation\u2014to study the CI failures of the past, to reflect on them, and to make sure they are not repeated.<\/p>\n The many CI courses being offered now are a positive step, but there will never be a substitute for a personal commitment on the part of our CI professionals to read their history, usually on their own time at home.<\/p>\n Analysis has too often been the stepchild of CI.\u00a0 Throughout the CI community, we have fairly consistently understaffed it.\u00a0 We have sometimes tried to make it up as we go along.\u00a0 We have tried to do it on the cheap.<\/p>\n Generally speaking, operators make bad analysts.\u00a0 We are different kinds of people.\u00a0 Operators are actors, doers, movers and shakers; we are quick, maybe a little impulsive, maybe a little “cowboy.”\u00a0 Our best times are away from our desks.\u00a0 We love the street.\u00a0 Research and analysis is really not our thing\u2014and when we have tried to do it, we have not been good at it.<\/p>\n True analysts are different.\u00a0 They love it.\u00a0 They are more cerebral, patient, and sedentary.\u00a0 They find things we could not.\u00a0 They write better.<\/p>\n A lot of CI programs in the past have tried to make operators double as their own analysts.\u00a0 As a result, in the United States, CI analysis historically has been the weakest part of the business.\u00a0 Professional CI analysts have been undervalued and underappreciated.<\/p>\n A good CI program will recruit and train true analysts in sizable numbers.\u00a0 I do not think it would be excessive as a rule of thumb in a top notch CI service to be evenly divided between operators and analysts.\u00a0 Very few of our US CI agencies come anywhere close to that ratio.<\/p>\n Wonderful things happen when good analysts in sufficient numbers pore over our DA reports, presence lists, SIGINT, audio and teltap transcripts, maps, travel data, and surveillance reports.\u00a0 They find the clues, make the connections, and focus our efforts in the areas that will be most productive.<\/p>\n Many parts of the US CI community have gotten the message and have incorporated trained analysts into their operations, but others have not.\u00a0 Across the board, we still have serious shortfalls in good, solid CI analysis.<\/p>\n More harm probably has been done to US CI over the years by inter-agency sniping and obstruction than by our enemies.\u00a0 I remember when the CIA and the FBI did not even talk to each other\u2014and both had disdain for the military services.\u00a0 It is no wonder that CI was\u00a0in shambles and that some incredibly damaging spies went uncovered for so long.<\/p>\n Occasionally in my career, I encountered instances of sarcasm or outright bad mouthing of other US Government agencies by my officers.\u00a0 That kind of attitude and cynicism infected our junior officers and got in the way of cooperation.\u00a0 These comments often were intended to flaunt our supposed “superiority” by demeaning the capabilities of the other organizations.\u00a0 I dealt with these situations by telling the officers to “knock it off,” and I would encourage other CI supervisors around the community to do the same.<\/p>\n CI is so difficult, even in the best of circumstances, that the only way to do it is together.\u00a0 We should not let personalities, or jealousies, or turf battles get in the way of our common mission.\u00a0 Our colleagues in our sister services are as dedicated, professional, hardworking, and patriotic as we are, and they deserve our respect and cooperation.\u00a0 The best people I have known in my career have been CI people, regardless of their organizational affiliation.\u00a0 So let us be collegial.<\/p>\n CI is a distinct discipline and an acquired skill.\u00a0 It is not automatically infused in us when we get our wings as case officers.\u00a0 It is not just a matter of applying logic and common sense to operations, but is instead a highly specialized way of seeing things and analyzing them.\u00a0 CI has to be learned.<\/p>\n I do not know how many times in my career I have heard, “No, we do not really need a separate CI section.\u00a0 We are all CI officers; we\u2019ll do our own CI.”\u00a0 That is a recipe for compromise and failure.<\/p>\n There are no substitutes for professional CI officers, and only extensive, regular, and specialized CI training can produce them.\u00a0 Such training is expensive, so whenever possible we should do it on a Community basis to avoid duplication and to ensure quality.<\/p>\n CI is a conglomerate of several disciplines and skills.\u00a0 A typical operation, for example, might include analysts, surveillance specialists, case officers, technical experts, and DA specialists.\u00a0 Each area requires its own specialized training curriculum.\u00a0 It takes a long time to develop CI specialists, and that means a sustained investment in CI training.\u00a0 We are getting better, but we are not there yet.<\/p>\n There are people in the intelligence business and other groups in the US Government who do not particularly like CI officers.\u00a0 CI officers have a mixed reputation.\u00a0 We see problems everywhere.\u00a0 We can be overzealous.\u00a0 We get in the way of operations.\u00a0 We cause headaches.\u00a0 We are the original “black hatters.”<\/p>\n Case officers want their operations to be bonafide.\u00a0 Senior operations managers do not want to believe that their operations are controlled or penetrated by the opposition.\u00a0 There is a natural human tendency on the part of both case officers and senior operations managers to resist outside CI scrutiny.\u00a0 They believe that they are practicing good CI themselves and do not welcome being second-guessed or told how to run their operations by so-called CI specialists who are not directly involved in the operations.\u00a0 I have seen far more examples of this in my CI career than I care to remember.<\/p>\n By the same token, defense and intelligence contractors and bureaucrats running sensitive US Government programs have too often tended to minimize CI threats and to resist professional CI intervention.\u00a0 CI officers, in their view, stir up problems and overreact to them.\u00a0 Their “successes” in preventing CI problems are invisible and impossible to measure, but their whistle blowing when problems are uncovered generate tremendous heat.\u00a0 It is not surprising that they are often viewed as a net nuisance.<\/p>\n When necessary, a CI service has to impose itself on the organizations and groups it is assigned to protect.\u00a0 A CI professional who is locked out or invited in only when it is convenient to the host cannot do his job.<\/p>\n My advice to my CI colleagues has always been this:\u00a0 “If you are blocked by some senior, obtuse, anti-CI officer, go around him or through him by going to higher management.\u00a0 And document all instances of denied access, lack of cooperation, or other obstruction to carrying out your CI mission.\u00a0 If not, when something goes wrong, as it likely will in that kind of situation, you in CI will take the blame.”<\/p>\n CI is a hazardous profession.\u00a0 There should be warning signs on the walls:\u00a0 “A steady diet of CI can be dangerous to your health.”<\/p>\n I do not believe anyone should make an entire, uninterrupted career of CI.\u00a0 We all who work in CI have seen it:\u00a0 the old CI hand who has gotten a bit spooky.\u00a0 It is hard to immerse oneself daily in the arcane and twisted world of CI without falling prey eventually to creeping paranoia, distortion, warping, and over zealousness in one\u2019s thinking.\u00a0 It is precisely these traits that led to some of the worst CI disasters in our history.\u00a0 Angleton and his coterie sadly succumbed, with devastating results.\u00a0 Others in the CIA and elsewhere have as well.\u00a0 The danger is always there.<\/p>\n My wife, who was working at the CIA when I met her, was well acquainted with this reputation of CI and the stories about its practitioners.\u00a0 When I was serving overseas and received the cable offering me the position as Ted Price\u2019s deputy in the new Counterintelligence Center, I discussed it with her that evening at home.\u00a0 Her response, I thought, was right on the mark:\u00a0 “Okay, but do not stay too long.”<\/p>\n Sensible and productive CI needs lots of ventilation and fresh thinking.\u00a0 There should be constant flow through.\u00a0 Non-CI officers should be brought in regularly on rotational tours.\u00a0 I also believe it is imperative that a good CI service build in rotational assignments outside CI for its CI specialists.\u00a0 They should go spend two or three years with the operators or with the other groups they are charged to protect.\u00a0 They will come back refreshed, smarter, and less likely to fall into the nether world of professional CI:\u00a0 the school of doublethink, the us-against-them mindset, the nothing-is-what-it-seems syndrome, or the wilderness of mirrors.<\/p>\n The tenth and last commandment is the most important.\u00a0 What if the Ames mole hunters had quit after eight years instead of going into the ninth?\u00a0 What if, in my own experience, we had discontinued a certain surveillance operation after five months instead of continuing into the sixth?\u00a0 CI history is full of such examples.<\/p>\n The FBI is making cases against Americans today that involved espionage committed in the 1960s and 1970s.\u00a0 The Army\u2019s Foreign Counterintelligence Activity is doing the same.\u00a0 The name of the game in CI is persistence.\u00a0 CI officers who are not patient need not apply.\u00a0 There is no statute of limitations for espionage, and we should not create one by our own inaction.\u00a0 Traitors should know that they will never be safe and will never have a peaceful night\u2019s sleep.\u00a0 I applauded my CI colleagues in the FBI when I read not long ago of their arrest in Florida of a former US Army Reserve colonel for alleged espionage against the United States many years earlier.\u00a0 They obviously never gave up.<\/p>\n If we keep a CI investigation alive and stay on it, the next defector, the next penetration, the next tip, the next surveillance, or the next clue will break it for us.<\/p>\n If there were ever to be a mascot for US counterintelligence, it should be the pit bull.<\/p>\n In Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n These are my ten commandments of CI.\u00a0 Other CI professionals will have their own priorities and exhortations and will disagree with mine.\u00a0 That is as it should be, because as a country and as an Intelligence Community we need a vigorous debate on the future direction of US CI.\u00a0 Not everyone will agree with the specifics, or even the priorities.\u00a0 What we should agree on, however, is that strong CI has to be a national priority.\u00a0 Recent news reports from Los Alamos, Washington, and elsewhere have again underscored the continuing need for CI vigilance.<\/p>\n Original Article by James M. Olson<\/p>\n James M. Olson served in the Directorate of Operations and is now on the faculty of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.<\/strong><\/p>\n http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=DmyzHuxgY2E&feature=youtube_gdata_player<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/2\/23\/CIA.svg\/200px-CIA.svg.png\" "\\"Cental")
<\/strong><\/p>\nThe First Commandment:\u00a0 Be Offensive<\/h3>\n
The Second Commandment:\u00a0 Honor Your Professionals<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/5\/55\/Civilian_Photo_Technicians_%28in_back_of_jeep%29_working_for_Counter_Intelligence_Corps%2C_are_accounted_for_by_Captain..._-_NARA_-_198977.tif\/lossy-page1-220px-Civilian_Photo_Technicians_%28in_back_of_jeep%29_working_for_Counter_Intelligence_Corps%2C_are_accounted_for_by_Captain..._-_NARA_-_198977.tif.jpg\" "\\"counter")
<\/p>\nThe Third Commandment:\u00a0 Own the Street<\/h3>\n
The Fourth Commandment:\u00a0 Know Your History<\/h3>\n
The Fifth Commandment:\u00a0 Do Not Ignore Analysis<\/h3>\n
The Sixth Commandment:\u00a0 Do Not Be Parochial<\/h3>\n
The Seventh Commandment:\u00a0 Train Your People<\/h3>\n
The Eighth Commandment:\u00a0 Do Not Be Shoved Aside<\/h3>\n
The Ninth Commandment:\u00a0 Do Not Stay Too Long<\/h3>\n
The Tenth Commandment:\u00a0 Never Give Up<\/h3>\n